God sees, and Jesus sends. Those two verbs are the subject of this study. If the Bible has been quoted at you to keep you small, it is fair to ask whether you can open it expecting to be seen. The way to find out is to read closely the passages where Scripture names women, meets them and sends them. Along the way you will practice one skill: separating what a passage says from what readers have added to it. You can work through this alone in about an hour. A group can split it over two sittings, pausing after Hagar.
Bring a Bible you can mark up and a pen. The method is slower than most of us read. First notice what a passage says. Then ask what it meant to its first readers. Only after that ask what it means for you.
The suspicion, and where it points
In a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation, host Lisa Fields put the objection plainly. Many people, she said, conclude that the Bible is not a liberating book but something that keeps Black people marginalized. Her guest, public theologian Ekemini Uwan, conceded the history first. Scripture, she said, “has been used” as a tool of oppression, and “We have to say that that is true.”
Her answer did not deny the harm. It relocated it, to “our reception of the faith.” She named what had been piled on, including white supremacy, sexism and rape culture: “It’s the misogyny that’s added on top of the faith.” Her caution to readers cuts in every direction: “beware of the interpreter.” She also said, “And the oppressor can look like you.”
That second line keeps the exercise honest. The question of what was added applies to the person who misused a verse against you. It also applies to you, including when you want a passage to free you.
Before you go on: write down one sentence you were told the Bible says about women, or about Black women. Write only the claim as you heard it, without a reference. You will return to it at the end.
Genesis 1: who receives the image
Read Genesis 1:26-28, then verse 27 slowly: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27).
The verse does not leave “man” unexplained. Its final line spells out who is meant: “male and female.” In verse 28 the blessing and the charge to rule are given to “them,” plural. The passage assigns the image and the charge to humanity as male and female together. Interpreters differ on what the image consists of. They also differ on whether the “male and female” line describes the image itself or simply names who bears it. Either way, the woman is not left out of the image.
Race is not in view here, and the verse should not be made to answer a modern question it does not raise. Uwan’s point about this chapter concerns how it was received. She argued that enslavers kept the Bible from enslaved people because passages in the prophets about liberation, “or just even Genesis one about us being made in the image of God,” would lead to resistance. That is a historical claim, and it should be tested like any claim about the past. The observation about the verse stands on its own.
Question to discuss: If two people disagreeing about women both began here, rather than with a later and harder passage, what would they already have to agree on?
Genesis 16: seen, named, and told to return
Read all of Genesis 16 as one story. Hagar is an Egyptian servant (16:1). Sarai gives her to Abram (16:3). When Hagar conceives, Sarai treats her harshly, and Hagar runs (16:6). The angel of the LORD finds her by a spring in the wilderness and addresses her by name: “Hagar, Sarai’s maid, whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go?” (Genesis 16:8). Nobody else in the chapter speaks to her by name. Abram and Sarai only talk about her.
Then Hagar does something no one before her in Scripture has done: “And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me” (Genesis 16:13). Uwan stressed who this is: “The first person to name God is an African woman.” She said Hagar “had the holy boldness to name God.” The text supports that emphasis. The narrator confirms that the one speaking is “the LORD,” and the name Hagar gives is about being seen. Her son’s name, explained in 16:11, records that the LORD heard her affliction. The woman treated as a household tool becomes the one who gives God a name.
The hard line comes two verses earlier: “Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands” (Genesis 16:9). Readers have taken it in sharply different ways. Some hear God sending an enslaved woman back to the household that abused her, and they refuse to soften that. The objection carries real weight, because submission language was pressed on enslaved women for generations. Other readers emphasize that the command comes bound to a promise in the next verses (16:10-12) and that it sends a pregnant woman out of the wilderness rather than leaving her alone there.
The genre helps decide between these readings. Genesis 16 is narrative. It records what Sarai did without praising it. The command is spoken to one woman, in one crisis, alongside a promise that belongs to her and her son. By Genesis 21, Hagar has been driven out, and God meets her again. A word given to a character inside a story is not a standing instruction to every mistreated woman who reads it. Turning it into one is exactly the kind of addition this study trains you to catch.
Uwan offered a principle that fits. “The Bible doesn’t hide sin,” she said, and when it describes sinful acts, “it does not mean it’s prescribing a way of being.” That principle does not make Genesis 16:9 comfortable. It does mean the abuse in the story is not the story’s message.
Question to discuss: How would you explain to a friend that 16:9 is a word to Hagar rather than a rule for her? What in the chapter itself supports your explanation, and what part of the objection still stands?
John 20: seen, named, and sent
Read John 20:1-18 as one unit, and set it beside Genesis 16. The scenes are similar. A woman is alone and grieving. A divine speaker asks her a question: “Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou?” (John 20:15). She does not recognize him until he calls her by name (20:16). As with Hagar, being seen comes first.
The difference is what happens next. Hagar is told to go back. Mary is sent ahead: “go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17). In verse 18 she goes and tells the disciples that she has seen the Lord. In John’s account she is the first to carry word of the risen Jesus to anyone.
Uwan described Mary as someone “who just believed that even just a dead Jesus was better than no Jesus at all.” She drew the consequence briefly: “Because of Mary, we know about Jesus.” Every later believer received the news through a chain that began with this woman’s testimony.
Lisa Fields read the scene against an old misuse of Eve, who gave Adam the fruit. Here Jesus gives the message to a woman, and she takes it to men. In that pattern Lisa hears God saying “you’re not going to make women the problem.” John does not state that he is reversing Genesis 3. Lisa offered the comparison as something she sees when she meditates on both scenes together. It is a reasonable link between two passages, and it is held as an interpretation. Telling the difference between what is on the page and what is drawn from it is the skill this study practices.
Question to discuss: Which parts of Lisa’s reading come directly from John 20, and which come from comparing it with Genesis 3? Does that change how much weight you give it?
Turning the test on yourself
A reading that honors women can still claim more than a passage says. Uwan’s question for every reader was “how are you coming to the text”. Three more questions for individuals or groups:
- Uwan distinguished the faith from “our reception of the faith.” Think of a teaching about women you are unsure about. What would you need to see in the passage to decide which side of that line it falls on?
- Where might your own hopes, even good ones, push you to make Hagar or Mary say more than their stories say?
- Uwan admitted, “There’s many nameless women in the Bible.” Choose one hard passage about a woman. What does the text report, and what, if anything, does it tell readers to do?
For groups: the first response may be personal rather than textual. Answer the person before the argument, as Uwan did when she began by validating the objection. Sharing is always optional, and no one should be asked to describe how a verse was used against her. If someone discloses abuse, speak with her privately and take it seriously instead of making it a group lesson. For anyone in an abusive situation, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
The practice: strip one claim back to the text
Go back to the sentence you wrote at the start. Over the coming week, take it through four steps.
- Find the passage it came from. If no one ever gave you a reference, write that down. The missing reference is a finding.
- Read the whole literary unit, at least a full chapter, and name the genre: story, law, poetry, letter or prophecy.
- Make two columns. On the left, write what the passage actually says. On the right, write what the claim added.
- Then write the reading you would most like to be true, and check whether it adds something as well.
Even if the passage stays hard, you will know where the difficulty lies, which is more than the person who gave you that sentence knew. Lisa Fields said that if coming to faith “made you docile, you got it wrong.” Reading this carefully is not docile.
Uwan pointed those who wrestle with hard texts to Moses, who after Israel’s idolatry asked, “I beseech thee, shew me thy glory” (Exodus 33:18). She assured them God would not back away from their questions. Take one question into your next reading: when God sees a woman on the page, is he sending her back, sending her out, or simply seeing her, and what does the passage itself tell you?